Frozen Charlotte

by Alex Bell

  “Who cares anyway?” Kyle said. “It’s Brett’s turn.”

  “Truth or dare, Brett?” Piper said, turning to her boyfriend.

  After what Piper had just said, he didn’t look much like he wanted to play any more – his big shoulders were all hunched and he was sort of slumped in the sand like an ape having a sulk. “Dare,” he grunted.

  “Ooh, good choice,” Piper said. She tapped her finger against her cheek and made a big show of trying to come up with something. Finally she said, “I’ve got it! Brett, I dare you to give Sophie her first kiss!”

  “No thanks,” I said, already leaning back.

  “Sure, why not?” Brett said, glaring at Piper. With those tiny piggy eyes and sulky mouth I wondered how anyone could find him handsome. “Maybe she’ll appreciate me more than you do.”

  Before I could stop him, he lunged towards me and pressed his mouth to mine.

  It was a wet, slimy sort of kiss. His lips mashed roughly against my own and I could taste cigarette smoke on my tongue. Whenever I’d thought about what my first kiss would be like, I’d never imagined it would be as horrible as this. I shoved his chest hard with both hands to get him off my face. Then I slapped him. Hard.

  “Don’t ever touch me again,” I said.

  Kyle laughed. “That’s you told, mate!”

  Brett glared at me and, for a moment, I really thought he was going to punch me. But then he just said, “What the hell is your problem?”

  “It’s only a game, Sophie!” Piper said. But we both knew that it wasn’t.

  “I don’t want to play it any more,” I said. “I’m going to bed.”

  I got up and went into the tent I was sharing with Piper and the other girls. I wiped at my mouth angrily, wishing that I’d brought some mints so that I could get that disgusting taste out of my mouth. I was shaking with anger and didn’t think I’d be able to sleep, despite the fact I’d got so little the night before. I lay awake in my sleeping bag for a while, listening to them giggling together out there in the dark and sure that, whatever the joke was, it was at my expense.

  Cameron had been right about Piper – there was something wrong with her. I thought about what Pat Jones had said about the dolls and wondered whether they could be responsible somehow for her behaviour.

  The others went to bed not long after me. I pretended to be asleep when Piper, Gemma and Sarah came into the tent, and, after a bit of giggling and fidgeting around, they finally went to sleep, and so did I.

  At some point during the night I opened my eyes and thought I saw someone outside. It was Cameron, standing on the other side of the glowing embers of the fire, staring off down the dark beach. Then he turned his head right towards me and our eyes seemed to meet for a moment through the last glow of the dying fire.

  I sat up, rubbing my eyes in confusion and peering through the open flap of the tent but the beach was dark and deserted and I couldn’t see Cameron anywhere. Perhaps I’d dreamed it. Why would he be down here on the beach in the middle of the night anyway?

  I lay back down and slept until the early hours of the morning, when something woke me for real. Pale light streamed through the open door of the tent, the other girls were still asleep around me and I could hear the ocean lapping at the beach outside.

  At first, I thought the voices I heard were the waves whispering against the sand, but then I heard the words, only barely audible beneath the soft rumble of the sea.

  “Charlotte is cold…”

  “Charlotte is cold…”

  “Sophie? Sophie?”

  “We want to play with you…”

  “Charlotte is cold…”

  “Let’s play the Freezing-to-Death Game!”

  “No, no, let’s play the Stick-a-Needle-in-Your-Eye Game!”

  “My favourite!”

  There was muffled giggling, childish and high-pitched and, somehow, slightly insane.

  And that was when the screaming started.

  There was panic in that scream, and fear too, but mostly there was pure agony. The mindless shrieks of someone in terrible, excruciating pain.

  The other girls were awake now, jerking upright in their sleeping bags and staring around at each other.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Who’s screaming?”

  “Is that Brett?”

  We tumbled out of the tent together, just in time to see Brett come staggering out of the boys’ tent with both his hands over his eyes. Kyle was right behind him, his face completely white.

  Since he couldn’t see where he was going, Brett stumbled almost at once and fell to his knees in the sand. He wasn’t screaming any more but crying instead, demented sobs that slobbered up out of his mouth.

  “Brett, what is it?” Piper asked, rushing over to him.

  The sun was bright in the sky and it was already a warm morning but I felt cold all over as I noticed the thin lines of blood trickling down between Brett’s fingers.

  “My eyes!” he said, his voice all thick and wet sounding. His big shoulders heaved in another sob. “I can’t see!” Blood ran down his hands and landed in big fat drops on the beach, where they were instantly gobbled up by the black sand.

  “We were asleep,” Kyle said. “We were asleep and then he just … he suddenly started screaming like that.”

  “Let me see what’s happened,” Piper said.

  Brett just knelt hunched there in the sand, shaking his head and moaning and even rocking himself a little. Gemma and Sarah stared at him, their mouths open in shock.

  “Let me see,” Piper said again, and she grabbed his hands and pulled them away.

  We all cried out when we saw his face. Gemma, inexplicably, actually turned and ran off down the beach. Perhaps she thought whoever had done this to Brett might still be hiding in the tent somewhere.

  Spit dribbled from Brett’s mouth, and tears and blood mixed together on his cheeks. Both his eyes were closed and he couldn’t have opened them even if he’d wanted to – his eyelids were pinned shut by the two needles sticking out of each of his eyes.

  Chapter Sixteen

  He called her once, he called her twice,

  She answered not a word.

  He asked her for her hand again,

  And still she never stirred.

  The ambulance couldn’t get to the beach so the paramedics had to climb down the clifftop steps with the stretcher. Brett looked so pathetic slumped there on his knees in the sand, crying and groaning, reaching out blindly to the paramedics with his blood-stained hands.

  “Help me,” he moaned. “Please help me.”

  “How did this happen?” one of the paramedics asked, looking us over as if one of us had shoved the needles into Brett’s eyes as some kind of prank.

  We all just stared back at them in silence until Piper made me jump by suddenly bursting into tears.

  “I don’t want to get anyone in trouble,” she said. “But… But I think I saw my brother down on the beach last night. He thought Brett destroyed his piano and he was so angry about it. I was afraid of what he might do…”

  The paramedics exchanged glances as they strapped Brett on to the stretcher. “You’d better go home,” one of them said. “And tell your brother to stay where he is for now.”

  After the paramedics had taken Brett away, the rest of us cleared up the campsite as quickly as we could. No one said anything. We just worked in silence. I was too furious to speak to Piper. She knew full well that Cameron had had nothing to do with what had happened to Brett and yet she’d pointed the finger at him anyway.

  I went into the boys’ tent and it was immediately obvious which sleeping bag and pillow had been Brett’s because of the bloodstains smeared across the white pillow. There were even a few drops of blood on the sides of the tent.

  I shivered and reached down to pick up Brett’s sleeping bag. I meant to roll it up but something fell out of it, landing on the sand with a thump. Frowning, I peered down at it. The moment I realized what
the white object was, I recoiled, my heart beating fast in my chest.

  It was a Frozen Charlotte, lying on her back on the black sand. One of her legs was broken at the ankle and the other was snapped off at the knee, but she had both her arms, bent at the elbow, with her tiny hands stretched up in front of her.

  It was hard to say what was more horrifying about the doll – the fact that both her hands were covered in blood that ran all the way down her white porcelain arms, or the fact that she was smiling. While most of the Frozen Charlottes had pursed little rosebud mouths, this one had an impossibly huge smile, stretched and grotesque, like the smile of a clown, that looked like it was about to split her head in two.

  I don’t want to go blind, do you? Lilias had said to me just a couple of nights ago. Lock your door if you don’t want to end up like that girl in the photo.

  I swallowed hard and, being careful to avoid touching the Frozen Charlotte, reached back down for Brett’s sleeping bag and pulled it off the ground.

  The moment I did so, I almost dropped it again in shock. When I picked it up I’d expected to see a smooth stretch of sand where it had been lying but, instead, there were hands. A whole forest of white hands sticking up out of the black sand, tiny fingers curled like claws. I remembered the feeling of being pinched, scratched and grabbed by all those hands in the dream I’d had my first night at the house. My own breathing suddenly seemed very loud in my ears. Somewhere in the tent, somebody giggled, then quickly smothered it.

  Piper came into the tent behind me a moment later. “Oh,” she said brightly. “How did they get there?”

  I looked at her and she smiled at me, a smile you could cut yourself on. I watched as she knelt down and dug away the soft sand to reveal the dark heads of the Frozen Charlotte dolls, like digging white corpses up out of the mud. And, all the while, Piper was humming to herself the soft, sweet lilt of the ‘Fair Charlotte’ ballad.

  “I… I’m just going to take this stuff back up to the house,” I said, backing out of the tent.

  Piper didn’t reply and I left her there, scrabbling about in the sand with the dolls.

  Gemma had come back by now, and she and Sarah were sat in a heap together on the beach, crying as though they were the ones who’d had their eyes spiked out. I ignored them and went straight for the steps that led back to the clifftop. I was out of breath by the time I got to the house and my hands fumbled with the lock on the gate. I wanted to get in and speak to Cameron before Piper returned. He must have seen me from a window because he was already coming down the drive to meet me when I stepped in through the gate.

  “I saw her,” he said, before I could say anything. “I saw Rebecca last night.”

  There were dark circles under his eyes and he looked like he hadn’t slept at all.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “I heard her, calling for help on the clifftop.” He shook his head as if he could hardly believe what he was saying. “I was in the hall last night after everyone had gone to bed. Shellycoat was in there with me when she suddenly started to hiss and all her fur puffed up. I thought she was staring at nothing at first but then I saw her. I saw Rebecca. She was outside the house, staring straight through the window at me. She pressed her hand up against the glass and it was frozen – her skin was all cracked and white, like … like one of those awful Frozen Charlotte dolls.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I called out to her but she turned away from the window and walked out of sight. When I ran outside I couldn’t see her but I heard her for a little while. She was calling for help – her voice sounded raw, as if she’d been calling for hours.” Cameron ran his hand through his hair and looked in the direction of the cliff. “I tried to find her but I lost her out there in the dark somewhere. I thought perhaps she’d gone down to the beach, but she wasn’t there. I went back up to the clifftop and searched everywhere, but she was gone.” He looked at me and said, “You were right. Rebecca really has come back.”

  “Listen,” I said. “Something happened on the beach this morning. I don’t think we have much time. Brett started screaming and then he came staggering out of the tent with needles shoved in both his eyes. Piper told the paramedics that she saw you there last night.”

  “Oh God,” Cameron said. “She’s setting me up. This whole thing with Brett and the piano and that night at the party have all been a set-up. She wanted to make me the perfect suspect if anything should happen to Brett.” He shook his head. “I knew something awful would happen to him if he stayed with Piper for long enough. I just didn’t know what.”

  “Is that why you attacked him that night?”

  “I didn’t know what else to do,” Cameron said, so quietly it was almost a whisper. “I didn’t know how else to protect him. I’d tried warning him off but that only made him more determined to be with her. So I thought that if I frightened him away then he might be safe. But that was what Piper wanted me to do all along.”

  “How dangerous is she?” I asked, dreading the answer. “How far would she actually go?”

  Cameron looked right at me and I could see exhaustion in his blue eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know. After what happened with Rebecca – first the fire and then the clifftop – I always suspected, I always wondered and worried but I could never be sure. Not completely. I love her, you know, that’s the worst part of all this. Even after everything that’s happened, even when I hate her, Piper’s still my sister. I remember what she was like before and I just wish she could go back to being that person. It’s like, one day, something inside her just broke. She isn’t right in the head any more.”

  “I think it’s because of the Frozen Charlotte dolls,” I said.

  Cameron groaned. “Not the dolls again! Why is everyone so obsessed with those horrible old things?”

  “Think about it. When did Piper’s behaviour start to change? And what about Rebecca? When did she start behaving badly? I bet it was after they discovered the dolls and brought them up out of the basement, wasn’t it?”

  Cameron thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “I suppose it might have been around that time.”

  I repeated everything Pat Jones had told me about the dolls, and how I’d heard them whispering through the walls and scratching at the glass, and about the ones that had mysteriously turned up on the beach.

  “I know it sounds incredible,” I said. “But it also explains a lot of things too. There’ve been too many deaths and accidents and injuries around the dolls for it to just be a coincidence. And I’ve heard them. I’ve heard them speak with my own ears.”

  “I don’t know,” Cameron said. “I don’t know what to think. But even if you’re right, what can we do about it?”

  We didn’t get the chance to talk further because the blue flash of a police car’s light announced their arrival at the house and, a moment later, the officers were hammering at the gate.

  Cameron looked at me. “They’ll want to take me,” he said. “If they think I’m responsible for what happened to Brett then…” He trailed off and I felt a chill of fear as my mind raced ahead. Brett had lodged an official complaint about Cameron attacking him with a riding crop. Then Cameron’s priceless piano had been destroyed and the police already knew he thought Brett was responsible. And then, just a few days later, Brett turns up blinded on a beach only a few metres away from where Cameron lived. He could end up going to prison, for a very long time.

  Cameron grabbed hold of my arm suddenly and said, “Please don’t leave. I’m sorry, I know I’ve got no right to ask you to stay, but please don’t go away and leave Lilias here on her own. Piper’s always known that I’ve suspected her and I think perhaps she’s been more careful, more restrained, because of it. That’s probably why she’s gone to so much trouble to get me out of the way. She must have started this plan months ago when she first started dating Brett. If I’m not here to watch over her then God knows what will happen. Dad’s useless – I’ve tried to
tell him what Piper’s like but he won’t listen. I don’t think he can accept it. After Rebecca died and Mum broke down, he couldn’t take anything else. This isn’t your problem and I’ve got no right to ask you, but please promise me that you won’t leave Lilias here on her own.”

  His hand was tight around my arm and, as I looked up into his blue eyes, I knew there was only one answer I could possibly give him. “I promise,” I said.

  “She’ll have a plan for you too,” Cameron said. “I don’t know what, but she will have thought of something. You must be careful.”

  I nodded. And then the gate was opened from outside as Piper let the policemen in.

  “Didn’t you hear them knocking?” she asked. She wiped a tear from her eye and said, “Oh, Cameron. They’ve come to arrest you.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  He took her hand in his,

  Oh God! Twas cold and hard as stone,

  He tore the mantle from her face,

  Cold stars upon it shone.

  The police said that they weren’t actually arresting Cameron, not yet anyway, but they were detaining him at the police station, which seemed to amount to pretty much the same thing. When Uncle James came out and realized what was going on he wanted to go see a lawyer straight away, but the police wanted to take statements from Piper and me, so Uncle James put Lilias in the car and took us all down to the station first.

  We were taken to separate interview rooms and asked to go through what had happened. It seemed to go on forever, with two policemen asking me the same questions over and over again. They wanted to know what time we had arrived at the beach, what time we had gone to bed and what had happened when Brett started screaming. Eventually one of them asked me the question I’d been dreading: “Was Cameron Craig on the beach last night?”

  I didn’t know how to answer that. After all, I couldn’t say that he had been there chasing the ghost of his dead sister. And if I couldn’t tell them the real reason why he was there then they would surely assume he’d been there to attack Brett. He already had a motive as far as they were concerned. And if they could place him at the scene of the crime as well, then it would look really bad for him.